The legendary Rolling Stones guitarist announced today that he's writing a childrens' book. It's tentatively called Gus & Me: The Story of My Granddad and My First Guitar, and will be published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. Look for it this fall. (Photo: Neville Hopwood/Getty Images)

Bill Wyman

Richards isn't the only Rolling Stone with an unexpected second career. Former bass player Bill Wyman is now a photographer, a restaurateur (he owns a few Sticky Fingers rib joints) and...a metal detector. He loves collecting found objects so much, in fact, that he actually designed his own metal detector, which you can buy online. (Photo: ACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA/AFP/Getty Images)

Kelley Deal

The lead guitarist of The Breeders started knitting in rehab and continued afterward as a means of staying sober. She now has a thriving knitting business, selling scarves and sweaters online and authoring multiple books on the craft. (Photo: Trixie Textor/Getty Images)

2 Chainz

The rapper 2 Chainz is also something of a gourmand. Last year he released a new album, B.O.A.T.S. II: Me Time (Based On a TRUE Story 2), which came with a companion cookbook. But 2 Chainz isn't even the first rapper to foray into cooking. In 2008, Coolio launched Cooking With Coolio, a web series hosted by the "Gangsta's Paradise" singer. (Photo: Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Clear Channel)

Dr. Dre

At this point, Andre "Dr. Dre" Young might be just as well known for his line of headphones as for his hip-hop career. The artist and producer partnered with Beats Electronics in 2008 to bring studio-quality headphones to the masses. (Photo: Chelsea Lauren/Getty Images for BET)

Carrie Brownstein

Brownstein came to fame in the '90s with the band Sleater Kinney. She's now enjoying a full-on second career as an actress and comedian thanks to Portlandia, the sketch show she stars in alongside SNL's Fred Armisen. (Photo: Chris Weeks/Getty Images for Hakkasan Beverly Hills)

Terminator X

The Public Enemy DJ bowed out of public life years ago. Now, he lives on a farm in South Carolina and raises ostriches. And he does quite well at it. (Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

(Photo: ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images)

Neil Young was at South By Southwest this week to launch a new venture that's one step removed from his musical career: an MP3 player. The device, called Pono, was born out of Young's obsession with audio quality. He has famously decried the highly compressed audio files that we've been listening to for years, and Pono — along with the accompanying music streaming service PonoMusic.com — is an attempt to change that. It offers audiophiles the chance to listen to portable music with absurdly high quality sound (or as the Kickstarter page says, it's "an end-to-end ecosystem for music lovers to get access to and enjoy their favourite music exactly as the artist created it, at the recording resolution they chose in the studio").

Young's player has a host of proponents, including big industry names like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, James Taylor and Eddie Vedder. Of course, it also hasitsdetractors — critics who argue that it's scientfically impossible to register the difference in sound quality Young's player purports to offer.

Regardless, Pono officially launched yesterday on Kickstarter, offering early adopters the chance to scoop one up for $300 ($100 less than it's supposed to retail for). In the first day and a half, Pono raised more than $1.5 million — about double the $800,000 goal.

Of course, why would we ever doubt a Neil Young venture? The rocker has become known for his extracurriculars, which include designing and building bio-electric cars and building model trains. Click through the gallery below to learn about seven other musicians with equally varied hobbies and surprising non-musical side-projects.

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